Architecture and techniques for diagnosing faults in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure networks

ABSTRACT

The wide-scale deployment of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks has generated significant challenges for Information Technology (IT) departments in corporations. Users frequently complain about connectivity and performance problems, and network administrators are expected to diagnose these problems while managing corporate security and coverage. Their task is particularly difficult due to the unreliable nature of the wireless medium and a lack of intelligent diagnostic tools for determining the cause of these problems.This paper presents an architecture for detecting and diagnosing faults in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure wireless networks. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first paper to address fault diagnostic issues for these networks. As part of our architecture, we propose and evaluate a novel technique called Client Conduit, which enables boot-strapping and fault diagnosis of disconnected clients. We describe techniques for analyzing performance problems faced in a wireless LAN deployment. We also present an approach for detecting unauthorized access points. We have built a prototype of our fault diagnostic architecture on the Windows operating system using off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11 cards. The initial results show that our mechanisms are effective; furthermore, they impose low overheads when clients are not experiencing problems.

REFERENCES

• 1: B. Aboba and D. Simon. PPP EAP TLS Authentication Protocol. In RFC 2716, October 1999.
• 2: AirDefense. Wireless LAN Security. http://airdefense.net.
• 3: AirMagnet. AirMagnet Distributed System. http://airmagnet.com.
• 4: AirWave. AirWave Management Platform. http://airwave.com.
• 5: Mark Allman , Wesley M. Eddy , Shawn Ostermann, Estimating loss rates with TCP, ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, v.31 n.3, p.12-24, December 2003 [doi>10.1145/974036.974038]
• 6: Atheros Communications. http://www.atheros.com.
• 7: B. Awerbuch, D. Holmer, and H. Rubens. Provably Secure Competitive Routing against Proactive Byzantine Adversaries via Reinforcement Learning. In JHU Tech Report Version 1, May 2003.
• 8: P. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan. RADAR: An Inbuilding RF-based User Location and Tracking System. In Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, Tel-Aviv, Israel, March 2000.
• 9: Paul Barford , Mark Crovella, Critical path analysis of TCP transactions, Proceedings of the conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, p.127-138, August 28-September 01, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden
• 10: John Bellardo , Stefan Savage, Measuring packet reordering, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet measurment, November 06-08, 2002, Marseille, France [doi>10.1145/637201.637216]
• 11: D. Berry and G. Breeze. Microsoft IT division. Private Communication, 2004.
• 12: Bluetooth SIG. Location Working Group. http://bluetooth.org.
• 13: S. Buchegger and J. Le Boudec. The Effect of Rumor Spreading in Reputation Systems for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks. In Proc. of WiOpt, France, March 2003.
• 14: R. Chandra, P. Bahl, and P. Bahl. MultiNet: Connecting to Multiple IEEE 802.11 Networks Using a Single Wireless Card. In Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, Hong Kong, Mar 2004.
• 15: Cisco. CiscoWorks Wireless LAN Solution Engine. http://cisco.com.
• 16: Computer Associates. Unicenter Solutions: Enabling a Successful Wireless Enterprise. http://www.ca.com.
• 17: Ethereal: A Network Protocol Analyzer. http://ethereal.com.
• 18: Sally Floyd , Mark Handley , Jitendra Padhye , Jörg Widmer, Equation-based congestion control for unicast applications, Proceedings of the conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, p.43-56, August 28-September 01, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden
• 19: James D. Foley , Andries van Dam , Steven K. Feiner , John F. Hughes, Computer graphics: principles and practice (2nd ed.), Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1990
• 20: IBM Research. Wireless Security Auditor (WSA). http://www.research.ibm.com/gsal/wsa.
• 21: IEEE Computer Society. IEEE 802.1x-2001 IEEE Standards for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks: Port-Based Network Access Control, 1999.
• 22: IEEE Computer Society. Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications. IEEE Standard 802.11, 1999.
• 23: Andrew M. Ladd , Kostas E. Bekris , Algis Rudys , Lydia E. Kavraki , Dan S. Wallach , Guillaume Marceau, Robotics-based location sensing using wireless ethernet, Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570645.570674]
• 24: Ratul Mahajan , Neil Spring , David Wetherall , Thomas Anderson, User-level internet path diagnosis, Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, October 19-22, 2003, Bolton Landing, NY, USA
• 25: Sergio Marti , T. J. Giuli , Kevin Lai , Mary Baker, Mitigating routing misbehavior in mobile ad hoc networks, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.255-265, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345955]
• 26: Microsoft Corp. Native 802.11 Framework for IEEE 802.11 Networks. http://microsoft.com.
• 27: B. Neuman and T. Tso. An Authentication Service for Computer Networks. In IEEE Communications, Karlsruhe, Germany, Sept 1996.
• 28: Jitendra Padhye , Victor Firoiu , Don Towsley , Jim Kurose, Modeling TCP throughput: a simple model and its empirical validation, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '98 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.303-314, August 31-September 04, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 29: Nissanka B. Priyantha , Anit Chakraborty , Hari Balakrishnan, The Cricket location-support system, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.32-43, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345917]
• 30: L. Qiu, P. Bahl, A. Rao, and L. Zhou. Fault Detection, Isolation, and Diagnosis in Multihop Wireless Networks. Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-11, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, Dec 2003.
• 31: Maxim Raya , Jean-Pierre Hubaux , Imad Aad, DOMINO: a system to detect greedy behavior in IEEE 802.11 hotspots, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, June 06-09, 2004, Boston, MA, USA [doi>10.1145/990064.990077]
• 32: C. Rigney, A. Rubens, W. Simpson, and S. Willens. Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS). In RFC 2138, IETF, April 1997.
• 33: H. Schulzrinne, S. Casner, R. Frederick, and V. Jacobson. RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications. In RFC 1889, IETF, Jan. 1996.
• 34: W. Richard Stevens, TCP/IP illustrated (vol. 1): the protocols, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1993
• 35: Symbol Technolgies Inc. SpectrumSoft: Wireless Network Management System. http://www.symbol.com.
• 36: Roy Want , Andy Hopper , Veronica Falcão , Jonathan Gibbons, The active badge location system, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.10 n.1, p.91-102, Jan. 1992 [doi>10.1145/128756.128759]
• 37: Wibhu Technologies Inc. SpectraMon. http://www.wibhu.com.
• 38: WildPackets Inc. Airopeek Wireless LAN Analyzer. http://www.wildpackets.com.
• 39: WinDump: tcpdump for Windows. http://windump.polito.it.
• 40: Yin Zhang , Lee Breslau , Vern Paxson , Scott Shenker, On the characteristics and origins of internet flow rates, Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 19-23, 2002, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
• 41: Yin Zhang , Nick Duffield, On the constancy of internet path properties, Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Internet Measurement, November 01-02, 2001, San Francisco, California, USA [doi>10.1145/505202.505228]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.3 Network Operations

General Terms:
Management, Reliability

Keywords:
IEEE 802.11, disconnected clients, fault detection, fault diagnosis, infrastructure wireless networks, rogue APs